Que-BOL.

(My lord, this must be the weakest pun in the entire weak pun infested blog of mine (It's supposed to be a combination of "que" (Spanish for "what" (and COBOL (Oh my (It was really funny when I thought about it (not that it's of any excuse (Actually, this probably makes it worse (since it makes me one of those people who say "it was funny when I thought about it))))))))

I think the biggest issue I had with going 100% GNU/Linux (it's still dual boot, but the WinXP part is oh so smallish, it's not really been taken in any consideration) is that there's not really a solid, usable COBOL compiler. There are the usual suspects (mainly Micro Focus and Fujitsu), but those cost quite a bundle, and besides, I really wanted something a bit more... free (as in freedom (not as in beer (although that's always an added value (think of it as turning 21 (when you still need to pay for your beer (but you can drink it without being arrested (until you get drunk and start throwing things, that is))))))).

There are three projects, all GPLed and GNU/Linux centred which can answer this need, Open COBOL, Tiny COBOL and COBOL for GCC.

I've tried Tiny COBOL on the previous installation, and it didn't work at all. I've compiled and tested Open COBOL yesterday, and while it compiles fine (or at least without any errors/warnings) I do get this error when I try to run the program: error while loading shared libraries: libcob.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
Really irritating. I'll dig around the install process, to see if I missed anything, but it does look like it's going to be a long night. Of course, if anyone reads this and has any idea (heh, if anyone reads this would be a good start) I would truly appreciate any comments on the right direction.